The Early Hackers

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be
conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.
The Signals and Power Committee of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club
adopted the machine as their favorite tech-toy and invented
programming tools, slang, and an entire surrounding culture that is
still recognizably with us today. These early years have been
examined in the first part of Steven Levy's book
Hackers[Levy].

MIT's computer culture seems to have been the first to adopt the term
`hacker'. The Tech Model Railroad Club's hackers became the nucleus
of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the world's leading
center of AI research into the early 1980s. Their influence was
spread far wider after 1969, the first year of the ARPAnet.

The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer
network. It was built by the Defense Department as an experiment in
digital communications, but grew to link together hundreds of
universities and defense contractors and research laboratories. It
enabled researchers everywhere to exchange information with
unprecedented speed and flexibility, giving a huge boost to
collaborative work and tremendously increasing both the pace and
intensity of technological advance.

But the ARPAnet did something else as well. Its electronic highways
brought together hackers all over the U.S. in a critical mass; instead
of remaining in isolated small groups each developing their own
ephemeral local cultures, they discovered (or re-invented) themselves
as a networked tribe.

The first intentional artifacts of the hacker culture—the
first slang lists, the first satires, the first self-conscious
discussions of the hacker ethic—all propagated on the ARPAnet in
its early years. In particular, the first version of the Jargon File developed as a
cross-net collaboration during 1973–1975. This slang dictionary
became one of the culture's defining documents. It was eventually
published as "The Hacker's Dictionary" in 1983; that first version is
out of print, but a revised and expanded version is New
Hacker's Dictionary[Raymond].

Hackerdom flowered at the universities connected to the net,
especially (though not exclusively) in their computer science
departments. MIT's AI and LCS labs made it first among equals from
the late 1960s. But Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (SAIL) and Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) became nearly
as important. All were thriving centers of computer science and AI
research. All attracted bright people who contributed great things to
the hacker culture, on both the technical and folkloric levels.

To understand what came later, though, we need to take another
look at the computers themselves; because the AI Lab's rise and its
eventual fall were both driven by waves of change in computing
technology.

Since the days of the PDP-1, hackerdom's fortunes had been woven
together with Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series of
minicomputers. DEC pioneered commercial interactive computing and
time-sharing operating systems. Because their machines were flexible,
powerful, and relatively cheap for the era, lots of universities
bought them.

Cheap time-sharing was the medium the hacker culture grew in, and for
most of its lifespan the ARPAnet was primarily a network of DEC
machines. The most important of these was the PDP-10, first released
in 1967. The 10 remained hackerdom's favorite machine for almost
fifteen years; TOPS-10 (DEC's operating system for the machine) and
MACRO-10 (its assembler) are still remembered with nostalgic fondness
in a great deal of slang and folklore.

MIT, though it used the same PDP-10s as everyone else, took a slightly
different path; they rejected DEC's software for the PDP-10 entirely
and built their own operating system, the fabled ITS.

ITS stood for `Incompatible Time-sharing System' which gives one
a pretty good fix on the MIT hackers' attitude (technically, the name
was a play on its predecessor, the Compatible Time-Sharing System
CTSS). They wanted it their way. Fortunately
for all, MIT's people had the intelligence to match their arrogance.
ITS, quirky and eccentric and occasionally buggy though it always was,
hosted a brilliant series of technical innovations and still arguably
holds the record as the single time-sharing system in longest
continuous use.

ITS itself was written in assembler, but many ITS projects were
written in the AI language LISP. LISP was far more powerful and
flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a
better design than most languages of today,
twenty-five years later. LISP freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual
and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and
remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

Many of the ITS culture's technical creations are still alive today;
the EMACS program editor is perhaps the best-known. And much of ITS's
folklore is still `live' to hackers, as one can see in the Jargon File.

SAIL and CMU weren't asleep, either. Many of the cadre of
hackers that grew up around SAIL's PDP-10 later became key figures in
the development of the personal computer and today's window/icon/mouse
software interfaces. Meanwhile hackers at CMU were doing the work
that would lead to the first practical large-scale applications of
expert systems and industrial robotics.

Another important node of the culture was XEROX PARC, the famed Palo
Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the early 1970s
into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of
groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice,
windows, and icons style of software interface was invented there. So
was the laser printer, and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D
machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a
decade. Sadly, these prophets were without honor in their own
company; so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as
a place characterized by developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.
Their influence on hackerdom was pervasive.

The ARPAnet and the PDP-10 cultures grew in strength and variety
throughout the 1970s. The facilities for electronic mailing
lists that had been used to foster cooperation among continent-wide
special-interest groups were increasingly also used for more social
and recreational purposes. DARPA deliberately turned a blind eye to all
the technically `unauthorized' activity; it understood that the extra
overhead was a small price to pay for attracting an entire generation
of bright young people into the computing field.

Perhaps the best-known of the `social' ARPAnet mailing lists was the
SF-LOVERS list for science-fiction fans; it is still very much alive
today, in fact, on the larger `Internet' that ARPAnet evolved into.
But there were many others, pioneering a style of communication that
would later be commercialized by for-profit time-sharing services like
CompuServe, GEnie and Prodigy (and later still dominated by AOL).

Your historian first became involved with the hacker culture in 1977
through the early ARPAnet and science-fiction fandom. From then
onward, I personally witnessed and participated in many of the changes
described here.